Feedback+New York Speakers

Alison Carlman

Director of Evidence and Learning
GlobalGiving

As Director of Evidence and Learning, Alison helps GlobalGiving generate evidence, share learning, and collaborate with peers to explore key research topics in philanthropy. She also has the privilege of working to understand and accelerate GlobalGiving’s social impact and the impact of GlobalGiving’s inspiring nonprofit partners. In her former work as GlobalGiving’s Director of Marketing and Communications, she helped develop GlobalGiving’s brand voice and ethical storytelling principles. A Colorado native, Alison studied communication at Pepperdine University and received graduate degrees in community development and monitoring and evaluation from South Africa’s Stellenbosch University. While she supports many GlobalGiving projects, she’s most passionate about improving maternal health and addressing climate change. Alison lives and works from the Denver area, and she and her family recently put the finishing touches on a hand-crafted Tiny House in their backyard; let her know if you’d like to visit!

Sarah Cechvala

Managing Director
CDA Collaborative Learning

Sarah Cechvala is a Managing Director at CDA Collaborative Learning. She is an experienced researcher and facilitator, whose work focuses on conflict sensitive aid and accountability to affected communities, feedback loops, participatory program design, and responsible business practice. She specializes in engaging local communities and working with organizations on institutional change and mainstreaming effective practices through coaching and accompaniment. She has practical field experience and a background working in humanitarian and development contexts on issues of forced displacement, particularly in East Africa. Sarah has over nine years of extensive experience conducting field-based research and qualitative evidence gathering in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America with non-governmental organizations, governmental institutions, bi-lateral and multilateral donors, and the private sector. Sarah holds an MA from Georgetown University and a BA from Boston University.

Luke Church

Director of Innovation and Learning
Africa’s Voices Foundation
Luke is an affiliated lecturer at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, and the Director of Innovation and Learning at Africa’s Voices Foundation. He works to improve the experience that people have with socio-technical systems, including programming languages, AI platforms, buildings, public policy and humanitarian interventions. His work is practice-led and incorporates methods from philosophy, computer science, psychology and critical design. In 2018 he founded Lark Systems to explore ways of integrating different forms of intelligence.

Juan Clavijo

Senior Consultant
ORS Impact
Juan joined ORS Impact in 2018 and is excited to contribute to the social sector through his passion for data-driven learning that improves social outcomes. He is currently working with clients including Fund for Shared Insight, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In his work with Fund for Shared Insight he manages the evaluation of Listen4Good and other initiatives, working as thought partner to help advance their mission.
Before joining ORS Impact, Juan worked as a consultant in Colombia – his home country – focusing on political consulting and social policy monitoring and evaluation for public and private sector clients, including USAID and Univision Network. He holds an MPA degree from the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from the same university.

Sasha Dichter

Co-Founder
60 Decibels

I’m the Co-Founder of 60 Decibels, a company that helps anyone, anywhere, listen to their customers to create more social impact. We want to reboot impact measurement to make it useful to entrepreneurs and the customers they serve, and to help investors and fund managers better allocate capital to companies that create transformative change.

From 2007 to 2019 I worked at Acumen, most recently as Chief Innovation Officer. My job was to create and grow new verticals, and in my time as CIO I helped create Lean Data (the predecessor to 60 Decibels) and +Acumen, the world’s school for social change, while also growing the Acumen Fellows Program. In my prior role as Acumen’s Director of Business Development, I led global capital raising, and executed a successful $100M capital raise.

I’ve also been blogging and speaking about philanthropy, generosity and social change since 2008. It all started with my Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs, and my realization that if the nonprofit sector is ever going to realize its potential, we have to stop apologizing about the value of the work that we do.

Bill Easterly

Professor of Economics
NYU

Bill Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute, which won the 2009 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award. He is the author of three books: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (March 2014), The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), which won the FA Hayek Award from the Manhattan Institute, and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001).

He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed academic articles, and has written columns and reviews for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Review of Books, and Washington Post. He has served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and as Director of the blog Aid Watch. He is a Research Associate of NBER, and senior fellow at BREAD. Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009, and Thomson Reuters listed him as one of the Highly Cited Researchers of 2014. He is also the 11th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio.

Angela Eifert

Global Connector
Alight

Angela Eifert is a Global Connector at Alight (formerly American Refugee Committee) where she leads a team that builds relationships and bridges an array of connections to create new opportunities to support refugees around the world. She works to empower refugees to take hold of their experience in order to help make life better for people living in settlements and camps. She has spearheaded Alight’s ideas competition, Changemakers 365, and was the driving force behind the creation of the world’s first ever Rotaract club in a refugee settlement. Angela is a member of Hatch, a non – profit ecosystem and global network designed to activate creativity to build a better world. Angela’s work has been instrumental in launching new ideas and initiatives that have contributed to Alight receiving the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation in 2012 and being named one of Fast Company Magazine’s Most Innovative Companies for 2019.

Cheri-Leigh Erasmus

Global Director of Learning
Accountability Lab

Cheri-Leigh Erasmus serves as the Global Director of Learning at the Accountability Lab, a nonprofit organization aimed at building a new generation of active citizens and responsible leaders around the world. She graduated from Stellebosch University in South Africa with a BA in International Studies, and has spent a decade in the international higher education and international development arenas.

Through her work in leadership development, she’s conceptualized and implemented leadership and skills development curricula for emerging leaders geared for careers in both the private and public sectors. In her current position, she oversees AL’s learning and impact as part of a team working young leaders who are finding innovative ways to hold governments accountable in Nepal, Pakistan, Liberia, Nigeria, Mali,Niger, Mexico and South Africa.

Kathrin Frauscher

Open Contracting Partnership
Deputy Executive Director

Kathrin Frauscher is the Deputy Executive Director and Gavin’s co-pilot in leading the Open Contracting Partnership. Kathrin’s journey as a social entrepreneur started in an unlikely place – the World Bank Institute, the incubation lab of the World Bank. Kathrin worked in countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, and Mongolia on challenging but potentially transformative sectors including mining, construction, and service delivery. Once she realized the potentially massive impact that more accountable procurement processes could have, there was no turning back. While still at the World Bank, Kathrin and her team there began a user-centered iterative process to create a global organization that was better equipped than the World Bank to work across stakeholder groups in developed and developing countries to open up government contracting. Kathrin now co-manages the Partnership with Gavin where she is still thrilled by the daily opportunity to change how contracting can deliver value for everyone. Before working at the World Bank for ten years, she got a Masters in Advanced International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Economics from the University of Vienna.

Emily Fung

Associate, Business Development and Partnerships
Development Gateway

Emily is an Associate, Business Development and Partnerships at DG. Her focus is on the intersection between business development and communications, aligning the two to increase DG’s development effectiveness and further data use objectives. She provides support across DG’s partnership building process, including organizing and writing proposals and managing opportunities. She also leads strategic communications, coordinating external publications, the DG blog calendar, and events processes, and creates external pieces to best showcase project outcomes across DG’s portfolio. Prior to joining DG, Emily graduated with a BS in International Politics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Sabrina Hargrave

Program Officer
Brooklyn Community Foundation

Sabrina Hargrave joined the Brooklyn Community Foundation in Fall 2018, bringing over a decade of experience in performance management and program evaluation in both research and nonprofit settings serving youth, families, and refugees. Born in Argentina and proudly raised in Brooklyn, Sabrina received her Master’s in Public Administration from New York University and her Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University. Her current projects include the implementation of the Brooklyn Elders Fund strategy and serving as Chair of the evaluation sub-committee for the New York State Census Equity Fund.

Antoine Heuty

Chief Executive Officer
Ulula

Antoine Heuty is the founder and CEO of Ulula (www.ulula.com)- a software and analytics platform to create more transparent and responsible supply chains. Ulula uses simple mobile phones to connect directly and anonymously with community members to prevent socio-environmental conflicts, measure and help improve local impacts in extractive industries and other value chains. He previously held senior positions at the international Natural Resource Governance Institute and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He is the co-author of various publications on transparency, mobile technology, natural resource governance and supply chains. He has graduate degrees from Sciences Po Paris, Oxford and Columbia University.

Reed Jordan

Senior Project Manager for fair housing
NYC Housing Preservation and Development

Reed Jordan is the Senior Project Manager for fair housing at HPD. He is an urban planner and policy analyst with prior experiences in local and national housing and community development policy research at the Urban Institute. He received his Master’s in City Planning at MIT.

Anna Levy

Researcher & Consulant, Accountability Politics

Anna Levy is a freelance researcher and analyst focused on structural inequality, political transitions, and transnational accountability politics. Her work over the last eight years has been focused on environmental and social movements, the political economy of the international aid industry, the suspension of rights in border and migration crises, decolonization and development, and the pursuit of civil and political rights in the context of enduring historical legacies of discrimination, often with a focus on how the digital age shapes and is shaped by each. Anna teaches two courses on development and humanitarian politics at Fordham University, and has worked on related research and analysis at Princeton, American, and New York Universities as well as in management and advisory roles in small grassroots coalitions and large transnational non-profits alike. The regions that most influence her thought, work, and direction are the Levantine Middle East, Central America, and the United States. She holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs focused on political and economic transitions, oral history and historical memory.

Parker Krasney

Assistant Director of Programs and Partnerships
New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity
Parker Krasney is Assistant Director of Programs and Partnerships with the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. Building on a public service career spanning direct service, advocacy, and philanthropy, Parker today works with government, nonprofit, and research partners to shepherd the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of human service strategies to reduce poverty, increase equity, and combat racial disparities in New York City. He holds an MPA from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, and a BA in Anthropology from Vassar College.

Elizabeth Lockwood

CBM Representative at the United Nations
United Nations

Dr. Elizabeth Lockwood is the CBM Representative at the United Nations in New York. She focuses on developing advocacy strategies to raise awareness, build capacity, and lobby for the rights of persons with disabilities at the UN level in relation to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Sustainable Development Goals, and disability inclusive development. Dr. Lockwood focuses on the 2030 Agenda, disability data and statistics, financing for development, and accessibility. She also is partially seconded to the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management at the UN Headquarters focusing on accessibility in meetings and conferences. Dr. Lockwood was raised by Dutch and American parents and has lived and worked in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Navajo Nation engaging in disability-focused grassroots activism and policymaking with emphasis on inclusive strategies and systematic change through advocacy, collaboration, and awareness. She holds a Ph.D. in Disability Studies; a Master of Public Policy with specialization in International Development and Disability; and is fluent in English, Spanish, American Sign Language and four additional sign languages.

Betsy MacLean

Executive Director
Hester Street

Betsy MacLean is the Executive Director of Hester Street and has been engaged in groundbreaking, sustainable community development work for more than 15 years. As the ED of Hester Street, Betsy and her team work with community organizations, private firms and government agencies throughout New York City and nationwide to provide low-income communities with the tools they need to shape their built environment. Before Hester Street, Betsy worked in East New York as the Director of Community Development at Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation where she oversaw well over $100 million of affordable housing development and spearheaded the community-driven design of Brooklyn’s first green public school, P.S. 89. She has led strategy and development for all of Hester Street’s projects since 2014, including landmark citywide initiatives like Where We Live NYC: Fair Housing Together and CreateNYC: A Cultural Plan for All New Yorkers.

Betsy’s projects have earned The Alliance for a Greater New York’s (ALIGN) Movement Builders award, ioby’s Heroes in our Backyard award, and the Boston Society for Architects’ Excellence in Affordable Housing award. Prior to her time in East New York, Betsy created and directed an international community development program in Cuba and, before that, worked as a carpenter. Betsy holds Master’s degrees in Urban Planning and International Development from Columbia University.

Khwezi Magwaza

Digital Creative

Khwezi is a digital creative from Johannesburg South Africa, now based in New York. As a writer and digital, radio and television producer she has worked with Primedia Broadcasting, Africa.com, BET News, Ebony.com and Essence.com. Most recently she was the content lead at Girl Effect, where she built global digital platforms connecting girls to critical information, skills, and entertainment across 66 countries in 15 languages.

Laura Maher

Program Manager
Siegel Family Endowment

Laura is a program manager at Siegel Family Endowment, with a mission is to understand and shape the impact of technology on society. At Siegel, she Identifies and shapes innovation opportunities and research projects with partners working in education, civic tech, open data, ethical AI, workforce, and biotech. She also leads grantee teams though challenges using human-centered design. Some of her notable projects are branding, organizational design, revenue strategy, and public outreach. Before working at Siegel, Laura had 10+ years of US and international experience designing and stewarding mission-aligned projects, distilling complex information into actionable insights, and managing relationships.

Bethia McNeil

Chief Executive Officer
The Centre for Youth Impact

Bethia is CEO of the Centre for Youth Impact in the UK where she works to lead a movement towards more meaningful evaluation and improvement in the out of school youth field. She previously worked in a variety of policy and research roles in national non-profits and advocacy organisations, including the Dartington Social Research Unit, the Young Foundation, the National Youth Agency and NIACE (now the Learning and Work Institute). Bethia is a Clore Social Leadership Fellow and a Senior Visiting Fellow at Nottingham Trent University.

Anthonine Pierre

Deputy Director
Brooklyn Movement Center

Anthonine Pierre is a community organizer, facilitator and writer imperfectly loving and strategizing her way to the world she wants to live in. She currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, where you can usually find her implementing leadership development activities and yelling at the mayor about discriminatory and abusive policing.

Most notably, she led campaign efforts supporting the family of Saheed Vassell, a Black man unjustly killed by the NYPD on April 4, 2018 in Crown Heights. Through BMC’s membership in Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), Anthonine has supported the campaigns for justice for other New Yorkers killed by the NYPD, including Eric Garner, Delrawn Small and Ramarley Graham. In 2017, she also worked to pass the Right to Know Act legislation in the City Council, which ends unconstitutional searches and requires police officers to identify themselves in most civilian stops.

Anthonine is deeply committed to leveraging her leadership to create leadership possibilities with others. In 2013, she co-founded No Disrespect, a Black woman led anti-street harassment collective addressing the issue in Central Brooklyn through a restorative justice lens. She has also trained over 500 advocates and organizers on government advocacy as a facilitator with the Advocacy Institute since 2015.

Anthonine currently sits on the Steering Committee of CPR, the Community Funding Committee of the North Star Fund and the Advisory Board of the Advocacy Institute. Anthonine is a lifelong Brooklynite and enthusiasm enthusiast. When she’s not problem solving in the movement, she’s usually biking in Flatbush with her husband Jeffrey.

Isella Ramirez

Senior Project Manager
Hester Street

Isella Ramirez is a Senior Project Manager at Hester Street with extensive community organizing and leadership development experience. Isella manages participatory planning and community design projects with partner organizations citywide and in New Jersey. She facilitates processes with diverse partners and stakeholders; builds relationships with partners and potential supporters; oversees the design and development of workshop and meeting tools; and leads the strategy of various projects.
With nearly a decade of community organizing and leadership experience, Isella brings a social and environmental justice perspective to Hester Street’s goal of shifting power in planning policies and practices and decision-making processes. Having grown up in an industrial suburb southeast of Los Angeles, she understands firsthand the negative impacts of bad planning. During her time at UCLA, she focused her research on municipal policies and practices to ensure economic and community development that does not result in negative health impacts. She holds a B.A in Latin American & Latina(o) Studies from Vassar College and a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Ambika Samarthya-Howard

WITNESS

Ambika Samarthya-Howard is a video producer and formerly the Head of Communications for Praekelt.org. She received her MFA in Film at Columbia University and has done art and media projects in Japan, Bollywood, and West Africa. She worked as a senior producer in community television in Brooklyn, with the BBC Media Action in Nigeria as a broadcast TV Trainer and with UNICEF as a Communications Specialist. She led the content curation and writing for the Medium Publication, Mobile For Good, and has spoken about social good projects and inclusivity at a range of conferences globally, winning best poster at the recent University of London’s Behavior Change Conference. She co-authored two chapters in the recently published book Affordability Issues Surrounding the Use of ICT for Development and Poverty Reduction.

Michael Sandler

Director of Neighborhood Planning
NYC Housing Preservation and Development

Michael is the Director of Neighborhood Planning at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). The Neighborhood Planning Team leads the agency’s commitment to strategic preservation and development through engagement with tenants, landlords, community leaders, and neighborhood stakeholders on issues involving the creation of vibrant neighborhoods anchored by affordable housing. Michael received a Masters of Urban Planning from NYU with a focus on housing and economic development.

Michael Thatcher

President & CEO
Charity Navigator

Michael leads Charity Navigator in its efforts to make impactful philanthropy easier for all by providing donors and the charities they love with tools, ratings and information needed for informed decisions and investments.

Prior to joining Charity Navigator Michael spent more than fifteen years with Microsoft, the last ten of which, as their Public-Sector Chief Technology Officer responsible for technology policy initiatives and engagements with governments and academic leaders in Asia, the Middle-East and Africa.

Michael’s eclectic background includes years at sea conducting oceanographic research with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, composing music and dancing internationally as the co-founder and co-director of Dance Music Light. He has held various board positions within the nonprofit and technology sector, holds several patents in enterprise systems management and has a degree in Music from Columbia University in New York.

Valerie Threlfall

Founder and Principal
Ekouté

Valerie Threlfall is the founder and principal of Ekouté, a consulting firm based in Oakland, CA that specializes in helping organizations to gather input and feedback from stakeholders, especially those that they seek to serve. Ekouté has led multiple strategy and listening projects for clients including Crescent Porter Hale Foundation, Feedback Labs, Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, New Door Ventures, PACE, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
A core project for Ekouté is staffing Listen4Good, a capacity building initiative of the Fund for Shared Insight that focuses on strengthening organizations’ efforts to listen and incorporate feedback from those they serve into their work. Since 2016, Valerie has served as Managing Director of the Listen4Good initiative, leading the initial design of the offering, developing the resources for participating nonprofits, and overseeing a coaching and central product team that supports more than 400 participating organizations.

Valerie brings significant expertise in data-driven decision-making, strategy, and impact measurement to her work. Prior to starting Ekouté, she was founding director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP’s) YouthTruth project—one of the first national efforts to gather comparative feedback from students about what’s working and not working in their schools. Prior to joining CEP, Valerie was part of the core business team that built a successful start-up biotechnology company, Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Valerie holds a joint MBA and MPP from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Midori Valdivia

Chief of Staff to Chairman & CEO
Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Midori is the Chief of Staff to the President of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the overall umbrella organization responsible for the transportation of 8.5 million people each day in the New York region, including New York City Transit, Long Island Rail Road, Metro North and MTA Bridges & Tunnels. The MTA President is focused on major organizational priorities including securing long-term sustainable funding for the MTA and leading modernization and reforms efforts at the MTA.

Midori has spent her career working on transportation and urban planning issues in New York City. Midori was the Deputy Commissioner for Finance and Administration at the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC), the City agency responsible for licensing and regulating taxis and other for-hire services in New York City. She directed the organization’s operating and financial strategy in the age of Uber and led the development of one of the largest wheelchair-accessible taxi fleets for people with disabilities in the United States. Midori also served as a Special Assistant and Senior Advisor to the Executive Director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, focusing on major regional investments including the building of a new terminal at LaGuardia Airport and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center, specifically the construction of the National September 11th Memorial. Midori began her transportation career as a Leadership Fellow at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey where she had the opportunity to conduct stakeholder engagement on the first iteration of the Hudson Tunnel River project, now called Gateway. She is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School in Public Affairs at Princeton University and Penn State University, as well as the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a fellow transportation enthusiast.

Giovania Tiarachristie

Deputy Director of Neighborhood Planning
NYC Housing Preservation and Development

Giovania Tiarachristie is the Deputy Director of Neighborhood Planning at HPD’s Office of Neighborhood Strategies. “G” has over seven years of experience in participatory community planning. They hold a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Master’s in City and Regional Planning.

Samhir Vasdev

Advisor for Digital Development
IREX

Samhir Vasdev is a designer, educator, and technologist supporting global development through better access and use of data. At IREX, a global development and education organization, he drives efforts to foster better use of data and technology to inform decisions, learning, and action in aid efforts. Prior to joining IREX, Samhir worked at the World Bank’s Innovation Lab and Digital Development practice, where he helped governments collaborate with citizens to improve public services using open, lean, and creative tools and methods. Samhir holds a BA in political science and an MA in interdisciplinary technology studies, both from Georgetown University in Washington DC, where he also teaches courses on digital development and data literacy at the Graduate School of Foreign Service.

Daryle Ward-Cherry

Senior Project Associate
Hester Street

Daryle Ward-Cherry is a Senior Project Associate at Hester Street that supports the organization’s community design and planning projects citywide with her background in sustainable urban and community development. She conducts data analysis and visualization; designs and implements community engagement materials, tools and strategies; and oversees logistics for community workshops and meetings. She recently created an interactive engagement toolkit to identify New Yorkers’ neighborhood and housing experiences for Where We Live NYC and is supporting municipalities across New York State to develop more equitable code enforcement strategies through Cities RISE.
Prior to joining Hester Street, Daryle planned and implemented educational programs focused on green building strategies and best practices with the Urban Green Council. She holds a B.A. in Global Environmental Studies, Urban Development and Social Change from Clark University, where she focused on strategies for overcoming deep-seated challenges in creating sustainable communities for people of color globally.

Laura White

Assistant Chief Administrative Officer
City of Philadelphia

Laura White works to make municipal government more effective and responsive for the residents of Philadelphia. As Assistant Chief Administrative Officer for the City of Philadelphia, she has led projects ranging from implementing new technologies that enhance data-driven operations, to changing policy and operations to make contracting opportunities more accessible. Recognizing that government contracting is vital both for government to function but can also be a lever for local economic development, Laura has worked on several projects to ensure local, woman- and minority-owned businesses can compete for City contracts. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Relay Graduate School of Education and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.